IoT Security

What Makes IoT Security so Unique?

Volume and Variety
IoT devices are diverse – they come in various shapes and sizes with both unique personalities and potential vulnerabilities. This makes traditional end-point security models impractical.

Limited Resources
Connected devices must make do with limited on-board resources. Using highly customized or non-standard operating systems is common. As a result, they are often simply unable to accommodate typical security measures that are designed to protect more powerful homogenous systems.

Uninterrupted Services
Most IoT devices deliver services with real-time precision, making it impossible to burden them with managing intrusive security solutions.

Knowing What’s on the NetworkYou can’t protect what you can’t see, and most administrators do not have sufficient visibility into their IoT assets.

Long LifecycleIoT devices have a long lifecycle compared to IT devices. Many loT devices have no security but are, nevertheless, deployed with a life expectancy of 15-20 years.

Diverse Deployment ModelsIoT devices are routinely deployed in a distributive manner, both inside and outside the organization’s perimeter security, increasing the exposure to physical tampering and external threats.

Lack of Endpoint VisibilityThe lack of endpoint agents results in blind-spots within the IoT infrastructure. With no logs from IoT devices, current security solutions, like SIEM remain blind to IoT threats.

loT Devices Are Not Easily PatchedMost devices are not easily upgraded. Once deployed, they generally run the factory default software with no provisions to update it.

Proprietary/Industry Specific ProtocolsConnected devices often use non-standard and legacy communications protocols, which most security products do not recognize.

How do we solve the problem?

Trusted Behavior

To instill trust in the diverse IoT infrastructure, ZingBox invented the IoT personality-based approach to secure IoT. Each IoT device exhibits certain limited set of functions, flow and vulnerabilities regardless of where it is deployed, a.k.a IoT personality. This approach discerns each device’s behaviors and detects any unusual activities to enforce trust amongst connected devices. Traditional security solutions focus on data protection; ZingBox goes further to provide service protection for business continuity.

Discover

ZingBox IoT Guardian recognizes the connected devices within the system to understand and profile their trusted behavior and actions. It makes the IoT devices visible. With this knowledge of each device’s behavior, it can automatically sense, identify, and classify connected devices. Unlike traditional end-point security products, IoT Guardian eliminates the need to install and manage software agents.

Detect

Through Deep Learning algorithms, ZingBox IoT Guardian analyzes communication to and from every device to detect irregularities and provide alerts for suspicious behavior. The device context combined with risk modeling provides a comprehensive view into the security posture of the IoT infrastructure.

Defend

In real-time, ZingBox proactively identifies potential risks using a device’s known personality. Like a good watchdog, it enforces trusted behavior amongst devices and recommends action to course correct. ZingBox defends IoT services from cyber and insider threats including zero-day attacks.

Why do we need IoT Security now?

Information Technology (IT) security has been a highly visible and important part of an organization’s security strategy. Data protection has been an effective rallying cry to align organizational intent and fuel sophisticated security solutions.

For decades IT and Operational Technology (OT) have remained as two separate domains. Equipment such as industrial automation systems, medical devices, street lighting, and the like, have traditionally operated outside IT’s purview under the banner of OT.

But over the last few years, to derive business efficiency, there has been a strong movement to connect IT and OT into a single coherent whole. This convergence of IT and OT is at the center of the Internet of Things (IoT) Revolution.

The desirability of this convergence, however, is matched with the urgency of safeguarding a vast and expanding attack surface that is traditionally overlooked by the IT team.

ZingBox’s unique solution is the first to address the challenges of protecting IoT services, accelerate the convergence of IT and OT, and enable the Internet of Trusted Things.